If you like good travel stories, if you’re interested in Cuba and if you happen to be a fan of Ernest Hemingway, you should read the article in the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
Fix your favourite beverage and savour the experience.
Entitled Hemingway’s Cuba, Cuba’s Hemingway, it’s a vivid account written by his last personal assistant, who in 1960, after Fidel Castro’s communist rebels came to power, helped the novelist and his wife, Mary, reluctantly pack up and leave the country that had become so much a part of the writer’s being. Hemingway had lived on the island or maintained contacts there for thirty years.
The assistant, who was a young woman at the time, later married Hemingway’s son, Gregory.
Now, Valerie Hemingway has returned to Cuba to visit Hemingway’s farm home and his favourite places in and around Havana. She meets some of the people who knew him in their youth and discovers that, even forty-five years after his death, Hemingway is very much alive in Cuba. The people and places that inspired The Old Man and The Sea and Islands in the Stream seem to be keeping him from fading into the mists of time. His presence is palpable.
Valerie’s account is a fascinating look at an American who attained mythical status in Cuba.
And if you’re a baseball fan, there are a couple of amazing stories in this article for you, too!
Click here to read Hemingway’s Cuba, Cuba’s Hemingway. Photographs in the Smithsonian article are by Robert Wallis.
Hemingway photo in this article is a public domain picture from www.timelesshemingway.com.
If you've visited some of the Hemingway locations in Cuba, let us know what you thought of the experience. Post a comment.
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